Addiction ~ on selfishness and disease and earned consequences – OR – no one has a monopoly on tragedy.

Every time a celebrity dies of a drug overdose, I brace myself. For the inevitable I-don’t-give-a-shit-if-someone-kills-themselves-with-drugs-those-selfish-nogood-worthless-bastards updates and posts that are about to pepper my news feed.

But the part that drags on is a simmering anger at the way that some people feel the need to lash out at dead addicts. Live ones, too, but the verbal vitriol hits a crescendo when there’s a celebrity who is no longer alive on whom they can focus their dispassioned rage and righteous indignation.

One post, the day after Phillip Seymour Hoffman’s death, from a friend who has a knack for setting me on edge (so much so that I’ve hidden his feed more than once), sat in my gut like a boulder and circled in my brain for days.This is no tragedy, he said. Sad, sure, but tragedy is the father who dies of cancer, the police officer or soldier killed in the line of duty, etc etc etc.

Others, more often friends of friends, railed against the bad choices, the selfishness, the sheer rudeness of someone killing themself that way. Especially with young children. Those assholes don’t deserve sympathy. They killed themselves. They didn’t even care about their kids.

Here’s the thing that always, also, rings in my head over and over and over. If you never once tried drugs, or alcohol, or ate so much that you may have potentially compromised your health, or inhaled the sweet smell of rubber cement a little too long when you were in elementary school or drove home after a few drinks and realized the next morning that you were not in any shape to have driven – then line yourself up with the handful of other people this might be true for and pat yourselves on the back for being shining examples of The People Who Never Make Bad Choices. You all deserve a badge or a parade or something.

But.

The rest of you (myself included): shut the fuck up with the hate and venom and dissmissiveness.

Seriously.

Take a moment to imagine that it is only sheer luck, not your higher moral standing, that separates you from the dead ones. The strung out ones. The loneliest of the lonely.

I have family who are addicts. Some dead, some alive. Some clean, some not. Friends, too. One thing I can say with absolute certainty is that I made most of the same bad choices they did. You probably did, too. More than once. At least once.

When my sister was in her first stint in rehab, we talked a lot about the difference(s) between her and I. Why she couldn’t stop until she was almost dead. Why I always could.

Why I could try something and then decide I didn’t want to do it anymore. There are all kinds of possible reasons and none of them explain it. We both have addiction riddled on both sides of our families. We both used various things to excess. I could always get to a point where I made a rational decision to walk away from whatever it was I was abusing. She almost never could.

Why her and not me? There’s a lot of that question that can never be answered. Is it a disease? Maybe. Maybe not. Does she have a genetic predisposition that I somehow dodged? Doesn’t even matter to me if it is either of those things, insofar as my compassion for those struggling with addiction is what it is and will not change whether we uncover an ‘addiction gene’ or not.

None of us know what makes you an addict and keeps me from being one.

What I do know is:
I did the same things as her when I was younger. And I do not struggle every day with a desire to use. I never have. And it’s not because I am better than her. Or even smarter. Or a better citizen and sister and daughter and human.

I remember reading a quote in an article around the time that Amy Winehouse died. To the effect that addicts don’t use to try to kill themselves – they use in order to try to live.

To try to live.

No addict, in my opinion, puts a needle in her arm in order to vex the people who love them. Russian Roulette? Sure. But so is eating processed foods over and over and over. So is texting while you drive. And on and on and on.

I won’t even spend time going into the ways that the self-medicating of undiagnosed mental illness often leads to addiction. Or the ways that overeating and eating processed or ‘unhealthy’ foods can lead to disease and that one could call that selfish and deem you a bad parent if a diet-induced heart attack takes you away from your children. Bad choices, all of us, all over the place.

I don’t see a difference, really, between those of us who quickly kill ourselves and those of us who do it slowly and legally. Except in the swiftness and severity with which drugs isolate people from the ones they love – temporarily or permanently.

Except in the way we treat an addict’s death as open season for judgment.

Except in the way some of us use an addict’s death to feel better about our own lives, our own choices.

I have had to cut people out of my life, my sister included, at times where her ‘choices’ were something I couldn’t condone. I know the knee-collapsing pain of kicking her out of my house because I couldn’t allow it evenone more time.

My compassion for addicts does not exempt me from intense anger at and pain from what addiction does to a person, to a family, to friends. I have never thought, though, that she (or anyone else struggling with addiction) should just go ahead and die. I have never felt the deep sadness of a family member dying from an overdose lightened by saying that they deserved it. I have never felt the need to diminish the epic sadness of an overdose.

And sure, celebrities are easy targets. They have fame. They have money. They have fans. How could they not be happy?

And sure, we don’t bombard social media with sadness and compassion whenever a homeless person in our neighborhood ODs. Some of us, though, if we knew that (when we know that), would (and do) feel just as sad. Just as scared. For those we love. For those we know. For what might happen to them. For the loss of a life at the hand of something so invasive and tragic.

Phillip Seymour Hoffman is just the most recent, recognizable face to have lost a battle with addiction. And so we mourn. Some of us. To varying depths. For the loss of a life. For the loss of some stunningly beautiful acting that we will never see. For his children. The tragedy no more or less had he died suddenly of a brain aneurysm that we could smugly say was not his fault.

I will not apologize for my sadness. I will not apologize for not thinking that someone was too weak to quit. Not, either, for seeing that we are all too weak to make all the right choices all of the time. And some of us (thankfully, me) made a lot of bad choices and with an ease not afforded all, could walk away and start anew. I could just decide to do that. For that, I am not sorry, either.

Go ahead and refuse the reality of addiction. Sit high and smug and separate. I hope you never need prescription pain killers for an extended amount of time and realize, when you find yourself hoarding more and more and more, that the Russian Roulette you played was believing that the gun had no bullets at all just because you were smart enough not to load it yourself. I sincerely do.

Sometimes, you don’t realize you have a gun in your hand and there’s a bullet tucked in there, waiting for you, until you do. And, sometimes, that’s not soon enough.

The stupidity of picking up that gun at all in the first place doesn’t negate the true tragedy of addiction.

If you want to dismiss the death of someone because their struggle was with addiction, then keep your bullshit to yourself. Please.

You have a right to think whatever you want. That’s true. But there’s no crime in allowing others to grieve when they feel grieving is necessary.

Death is sad. However it happens.

Loneliness – and that is what is at the core, in the last moments, for nearly every drug overdose – is tragic.

Tragedy is not the wrong word. Not if, to me, that kind of death is a tragedy.

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2 thoughts on “Addiction ~ on selfishness and disease and earned consequences – OR – no one has a monopoly on tragedy.”

I have strong aversion to the RIP Celebrity FB posts. I could go on and on and on about why, but it doesn’t really matter because at the end of the day, it is just my personal opinion. Empathy is odd and everyone feels and shows it in different ways. I tend to have more emotional empathy for animals, rather than people. I don’t particularly like people, to be honest. I feel like a lot of people like me, and I have a strange and strong desire to not disappoint people. That kind of describes my relationship with people on a basic level.
I personally find it really irritating to see people suddenly have an outpouring of emotion over a person that they did not know at all. I also feel that some people post about it because they want to be the one that “breaks the news”. Or they want to use the event as a way of drawing attention to themselves. But like I said, just because it bothers me, doesn’t mean I think people should stop. I may complain about it or crack a joke about it. Which is something that people will have to accept about me, just like I accept the RIP celebrity FB phenomenon. My mind is wide open. I can take it. It seems to be a weird sort of ambulance chasing that just doesn’t sit well with me.

Addicts? I also feel strongly about addicts being self absorbed and selfish. I speak from my own personal experience with addiction and my experience with watching the negative effects of my sister’s addiction on my family. The only way the two of us differed is in the fact that I never let my addiction truly harm anyone but myself. I struggle completely in secret and I choose not to involve anyone else. THAT is extremely difficult to do. It is my desire to not disappoint anyone surfacing again.
I feel the same way about suicide. I have suffered through the “disease” of depression… I have felt a strong overwhelming desire to end my life (many times) and I have fantasized about it to great length… the only reason why I have never done it is because I knew how much pain it would cause the people who loved me. And it is as simple as that.
My empathy for my loved ones is stronger than the pity and despair I have ever felt for myself. Same with my addiction(s). If I saw my problems begin to negatively effect my loved ones, I would think to myself “god, I am so selfish to do this to them… and to myself”. Most addicts will be the first person to admit that their addiction is completely selfish. It is this realization that usually helps a person get clean in the first place. they start out doing it for their loved ones, and then they realize how much they need to do it for themselves.
Recognizing it and doing something about it are totally different.
You may not have the choice to suffer from the “disease” of addiction…. but you do have a choice to not use. You can be an alcoholic and still choose to not be a drunk. It is important for addicts to be reminded of this instead of feeling that people just understand that they suffer from a disease. There is a fine line between empathy and enabling.
When someone is speaking about a stranger or anything else on a social media site, any topic is up for grabs. People’s opinions will clash. Emotions will flare. People need to remember that they may not really know the other person all that well, and there may be a lot of reasons why they feel the way they do that might actually change the way you look at them.
The most important thing to me is that everyone listens to each other. Even if you don’t like what you hear or even if it seems offensive or unacceptable to you. Listen (with an open mind)… and respond, if you want to go down that road. Listen and then choose to not listen anymore, if that will make you feel better. I just can’t get on board with telling another person to be quiet.

I agree with you on a lot of what you’ve said. And this is simply my response in a way that felt more appropriate that arguing in sound bytes on facebook, mostly with people I don’t know. I preferred to let the thoughts settle in my head. In the case of my friend, for example, I pondered whether tragedy was the wrong word to use. That was the starting point for me: maybe he’s right, I thought. I decided, that for me, tragedy was the right word.

I would never say that addiction is not selfish, in its actions, as I believe that is the single biggest factor that isolates an addict and wreaks havoc on the people around the addict. And yes, most of the folks I know who are clean and have been for a long time, have found a way out of the selfishness of addiction, a way to think outside of themselves. But, at a certain point, the level of selfishness involved in addiction can become a chicken or egg discussion – how selfish was the addict before the addiction and how much selfishness came out of the narcissistic process of constantly trying to feed the addiction? That’s a whole other topic. Selfish or not, I don’t think their lives (and deaths) need to be summarily dismissed.

And, as you can verify, I didn’t post any RIP post and have a similar aversion to people posting one whenever anyone dies. You early updates, incidentally, did have my brain wrestling with the ways that we all identify or connect with certain ‘celebrities’ even though we don’t know them because their work means something to us. It is a one-sided relationship, to be sure, but there are people whose deaths affect me more than others, even though I never met them. I certainly don’t think a celebrities death needs to be sacrosanct – definitely not. And a lot of people do just throw out RIPs like their confetti. That’s not what was on my radar. I was not particularly saddened by the death of PSH more than anyone else who dies in that sort of sad, lonely way and leaves family behind to deal with the pain. I do have friends who were genuinely more affected. For various reasons. There are people, writers and musicians mostly, whose deaths will cause me grief. Real grief even though we never met. There’s nothing wrong with that or with being completely unaffected by the death of someone you don’t know.

To be clear, I am not trying to silence people. Not really. My reaction is to the people whose responses dismiss a large portion of the human population as expendable because they view themselves as being smarter and better, when, in my opinion, we all make all kinds of damaging and/or selfish decisions all the time. It’s the self-righteous people who dismiss all other viewpoints to echo their own, in my opinion, erroneous and offensive and narrow-minded statements. My ‘shut the fuck up’ statement is more about reacting authentically – in the way I think it when I read that stuff. Not a directive I expect people to adhere to. If they tell me to shut up, I won’t. But if I know someone is going to be hurt by my comments, I think more than twice before posting. And I ask myself if I am being self-righteous.

If they were open-minded, then a true discussion could happen. But I monitored several threads (and this is what I see every time a celebrity overdoses) where others were trying to have an intellectual discussion about nuances and differing opinions and these people would shut each and every one down with something to the effect that ‘those people’ don’t deserve any sympathy at all. That’s not a truth I can fathom at all.

The silence I am asking for is for people to respect that others may have sadness and that, given we all are highly imperfect people, the moment of someone’s death does not need to be the time to hurl vitriol. Actual discussion about the intricacies of death and addiction, sure. But that’s not what I’m addressing. Jokes? Sure, I can laugh. None of what these people were saying, over and over despite other opinions being offered, were trying to be funny. I have little to no patience for people who write off whole populations based on an elevation of self and morality that I find to be the shakiest of grounds.

And I know we don’t have to agree, I just wanted to be clear that I am not attempting to quiet any opposing viewpoints. I log in, I get what I get. But I can also add my voice to let others know how that kind of language is taken by some of us who feel very differently, And if they can tell us all to shut up, which *is* essentially what the people I am referring to are doing by shutting down conversations, then I can give my reasons for why I would prefer they do exactly that in certain scenarios. Gotta love the vast wormhole of the internet.